Sunday 28 August 2011

How To: Create Themes for Smooth YouTube Downloader

Overview:
This post explains how to create Themes for Smooth YouTube Downloader.


How To:
A Theme in SYTD is basically an XML file "ThemeName_Theme.xml" that defines the colors for different screens.
All themes can be found in "\Program Files\SmoothYTDownloader\Themes\" for a normal default installation.
In the Theme folder you can find the set of images used by the theme, replace any image with another PNG image to use it instead of the default ones.

Note: names after the "_" character, cannot be changed.


You can start by copying one of the existing themes folders and change its name.
The name of the theme folder is what the user sees when he goes to the Theme Selection Screen.
Note: because of a limitation in the way installation CAB file is created, all files under the Theme directory must start with "ThemeName_"
You can see that naming convention in existing Themes.


The XML defines two types of Color Nodes (You can't change one of them to the other):

  1. A GlossyColor is like the color used for the Top Label, which is constructed from 4 colors blended from Top to Bottom, there are some bultin glossy colors that can be used easily, or you can define your own glossy color by defining the 4 colors (see example in the built in XML files)
  2. A Color is just a normal color, which is constructed from 3 Components, Red, Green, Blue each with a value from 0 to 255



The formatting of the XML is straight forward, it contains a Parent Node that defines an application Screen Name with child nodes that define names of elements on that page.


Child nodes of "SettingsPages" node will affect both, Themes and Download Service selection screens.


Note: You can't remove any element of the XML, if the XML wasn't loaded correctly, the Application will fallback to Default Theme


Make sure to read the comments in the existing XML files.


Finally:
If you'd like your design to be included in this post, please email it to me, wassim.khalil9@gmail.com

3 comments:

  1. Youtube downloader is very widely used application on all over the Internet and working with it with a desired theme may be really fun.

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